The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Talking Vue with .NET Zuid
If you're not in the south part of the Netherlands, you might have missed my most recent appearance last night. Great hosts, guests and sponsors make the night and easy and fun talk.
After a long day at Techorama NL, I was whisked away to Eindhoven for a talk at the .NET Zuid group (e.g. Southern .NET Group). I was able to show them the basics of Vue.js and pontificate about my continued hatred of the phrase "Single Page Applications".
As promised, I wanted to make the slides and code available to the attendees. You can get them here:
Techorama Netherlands Wrap Up
Finally heading home from about a month of conferences! I can't wait to get back to my own bed, but in the mean time I've had a great time sharing talks with a lot of European developers!
This time I was in Ede, Netherlands for the first Techorama outside of Belgium. As usual, the team did an amazing job! Here are the slides and code as promised from that event:
Thanks for asking great questions and attending the sessions!
Off the Road
I'm in the middle of a road trip for three conferences and it's been an amazing time. Next up is Techorama Netherlands! I am lucky to be asked to speak at so many amazing conferences.
As so many of you know, I travel a lot for speaking and work. This year has been a tumult of experiences and emotions. With my film finally heading into post-production I've made a decision about conferences for the next fifteen months or so.
So I'm going to stop doing conferences that require a plane trip. This is a big disappointment for me, but I think it's necessary. I have a lot I need to get done this year and, as fun as conferences are, they take a lot of time and energy.
.NET Developer Days Poland Wrap-up
Had a great week here in Warsaw! Got to see some great sights and great developers!
Thanks to the great team behind .NET Developer Days! Great group of attendees that asked some great questions.
Here is are the slides and code links I promised:
Intellisense in ASP.NET Core Projects That Use NPM?
I've been advocating using NPM for a client-side package manager in the last few months since Bower support has been depreciated. And while this works pretty well (using Scott Allen's UseNodeModules middlware) to allow you to just point at the NPM folder.
Of course, for production, this isn't a great solution. I've been showing people to use Gulp or WebPack to copy only the files you need in production. But for development, there is a problem: Intellisense.
I've noticed that Visual Studio 2017 only seems to notice files in the wwwroot folder. After trying a bunch of things, I think I found a solution. If you open the CSPROJ file and add this section to point at the node_modules directory:
Seeding Related Entities in EF Core 2.1's HasData()
If you didn't notice, Entity Framework Core 2.1 has a new way to support seeding your databases with a method called HasData. Julie Lerman has a great new Data Points column in MSDN that explains how a lot of it works.
Go read that article first. It really covers the basics. Unfortunately, for my use, her article missed a tiny detail that I think is useful. But let's start with a brief overview of how HasData works.
In Entity Framework before .NET Core, entity framework had a way to create seed data but that method had a number of issues so they decided not to bring it over to Entity Framework Core. Now that we're into version 2.1 of Entity Framework Core, they wanted to allow for a way to seed the data with certain types of data.
Avoid Lazy Loading in ASP.NET
I know I am not going to make everyone happy with this post. I've been hoping to not have to make this post, but Entity Framework Core has finally added support for Lazy Loading, so it's time.
This problem is not new. Entity Framework (not Core) also has this problem. But it's far easier to accidentally do this in that version. Luckily, Entity Framework Core has made it harder to inadvertently turn it on. Let's see what's wrong with Lazy Loading in Web Apps.
Just to make sure were talking about the same things, I'll explain how Lazy Loading works.
Atlanta Code Camp 2018 Call for Speakers
The Atlanta Code Camp is coming again on September 15th! This annual event brings some of the best speakers from around the country! Be one of them.
The Atlanta Code Camp call for speakers is open until August 20th. Sign up even if you have never had a chance to speak before. Topics covered will include:
You can submit your talks here:
The Reports of the Death of JavaScript are Greatly Exaggerated
Not John BoltonThe notorious quip by Mark Twain came to mind today as I was reviewing comments to my recent blog post about Blazor, a lot of the comments talked about WebAssembly being the death of JavaScript.
The fact is that we've all been here before. In fact, we've been here many times. And I, for one, don't want to simply see WebAssembly as something to replace JavaScript. Here are my thoughts.
So I've been in software development for over thirty years (I know, i'm old). And my experience with web development started about twenty years ago. So I've seen a lot of solutions to avoiding client-side development with Scripting Languages come and go. Here's a short list:
Who is Blazor for Exactly?
In case you haven't been following the news about WebAssembly (e.g. WASM), it's a new way to build something akin to bytecode for the browser. The latest versions of most browsers now support it including Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Microsoft has built an experimental release of something called Blazor that builds web projects in WebAssembly so you can write all your code in C#. But after playing with one of the builds, I'm starting to think about who this really is for. Let's delve into what WebAssembly is and then how Blazor works to explain what I think.
There are a plethora of good descriptions of WebAssembly on the web, but I'll try and summarize it in practical terms. Essentially, it's a binary format for code in the browser. The expectation is that this code should run much faster than traditional JavaScript. This gives the browser several key benefits: